A merchant may provide an online marketplace for the purchase of a variety of items by customers online or over the telephone. Such items may include products that are shipped directly to the customer, media that is downloaded by the customer, and services made available to the customer over the Internet. The items may be made available for sale by a number of sellers, with multiple sellers offering the same item. The sellers may provide to the merchant's system the details required to list the items through the online marketplace. Such item details may include an identification of the item, such as a stock keeping unit (“SKU”); a title or description of the item; technical specifications for the item; the purchase price; item availability, such as whether the item is “in stock;” shipping parameters and costs; the geographic region in which the item is available to customers; the locale of the seller's fulfillment center; and the like. The merchant system may consolidate the details regarding a particular item provided by the various sellers by matching item identifying information, such as an item SKU, item title, and/or item description. The consolidated item details may then be placed in an item catalog and made available online for searching and browsing by customers wishing to purchase the corresponding items from the sellers.
The type of item details that may be provided by the sellers to the merchant system may be driven by the format and capabilities of the merchant's item catalog. For example, the item catalog may group items by product type or category, such as “Memory Cards” or “Batteries.” This may allow customers to browse and/or search the product categories to locate items they wish to purchase. In addition, the merchant's item catalog may include specific attributes for a particular product category, such as “capacity” for memory cards or “package quantity” for packs of batteries. Customers may rely on these attributes when searching the online item catalog to locate the items they desire. When a particular item is chosen from the item catalog by a customer, the details of the item may be presented to the customer based on the product category of the item, along with a list of the sellers offering the item, their corresponding purchase price and product availability, and a “buy button” or other mechanism for purchasing the item from the seller. Each seller is therefore benefited by providing values for as many attributes in the item catalog as possible, in order to ensure that the seller is included in the list of sellers once an item is located by the customer.
The merchant system may provide a mechanism by which the seller may periodically send the item details to the system for update of the item catalog. Some item details, such as the item SKU or item description, may be relatively static with the values seldom changing. Other item details, such as price and availability, may change on a regular basis and may require frequent updating by the seller. Because of the frequency of change of many item details, a seller may implement an automated integration process that accesses attributes of the item within the seller's internal systems, constructs data feeds containing the item details, and transmits the feed data to the merchant system for update of the item catalog. Such an integration process may require a considerable effort and cost on the part of the seller to establish and maintain.
The merchant may periodically enhance or improve the item catalog by adding new product categories, new item attributes, and/or new capabilities or features. For example, the item catalog may include a product category for alcoholic beverages. Items belonging to this product category may contain an attribute that specifies the type of alcoholic beverage of the item, such as beer, wine, liquor, and the like. In an effort to improve the quality of the customer experience, the merchant may expand the product categories to include new categories for each of the separate types of alcoholic beverage. In addition, the merchant may add additional attributes for these new product categories that are specific to each. For example under the new product category for wine, the merchant may add an attribute for the bottle aging time of the wine or the variety of the grape. Further, the merchant may add to some or all of the existing product categories the capability for the seller to offer promotional pricing, such as a 15% discount on orders totaling over a specific value.
Implementing such enhancements and improvements in the catalog may cause issues for existing sellers, however. For example, if the merchant were to remove the alcoholic beverage product category from the item catalog in favor of the newly established product categories for the various types of alcoholic beverages, the integration processes established by some existing sellers may no longer function. This could result in a significant amount of time and money being required for these sellers to implement new integration processes for the new product categories or the merchant to provide backward compatibility with the existing integration processes. Even if the now deprecated alcoholic beverage product category is retained, customers searching and browsing for wine utilizing the new product categories or the new attributes may not locate items offered by the existing sellers that are integrated with the older product category.
In addition, in order for a seller to benefit from the new enhancements and improvements to the item catalog, the seller must be able to provide additional item details to the merchant system to support the new product categories, attributes, and features. However, if the seller has already invested a significant amount in developing integration processes for the older product categories, attributes, and features, reintegration with the new item catalog may prove too costly. This may result in the merchant system having to support a wide variety of integration processes for the various sellers depending on the product categories, attributes, and features available in the item catalog at the time of integration.
It is with respect to these and other considerations that the disclosure made herein is presented.